The present invention relates to a rearrangement apparatus for manufacturing system and, particularly to a parts conveying apparatus for accurately picking-up parts accommodated in a coarse parts accommodating portion, such as a tray or the like, and accurately conveying the picked-up parts to a parts accommodating portion of another tray, for example, or accurately assembling the parts to a predetermined position of a machine to be assembled.
In the production line of electronic equipment, accessories or the like, when assembly parts are attached to an apparatus body, a teachable assembling robot fixed on a floor (referred to hereinafter as "teaching playback robot" or simply "robot", if necessary) is used to attach the parts to the apparatus body which is conveyed by some suitable means, such as a belt conveyor or the like.
When the apparatus body is a data cartridge body and the parts thereof are mirrors, the mirrors as parts are supplied by a parts supplier or the like in the state that each of the mirrors are placed into a tray having a plurality of "coarse" mirror accommodating portions. Such mirrors are used to detect an end of a data tape accommodated in a cartridge body. The mirror is assembled to the cartridge body so as to be positioned inboard of a data tape having a sensor hole formed at its end.
This data cartridge is inserted into a data streamer body, whereby a light emitting unit and a photo-sensing unit of a photo-detector disposed in the data streamer body are opposed to the mirror through the data tape. When the data streamer is energized to transport the data tape to the tape end, light emitted from the light emitting unit is transmitted through the sensor hole, and reflected by the mirror. Reflected light is sensed by the photo-sensing portion. Thus, the end of the data tape is detected, and the data streamer is stopped. If the mirror that acts as described above is inaccurately attached, the light reflected by the mirror is apt not to be sensed by the photo-sensing unit, and the end of the data tape may not be detected. For this reason, the mirror must be attached with high accuracy.
However, the above-mentioned teaching playback robot cannot directly pick up the mirror from the coarse mirror accommodating portion and cannot assemble the same to the cartridge body because the teaching playback robot cannot pick up the mirror if the mirror is not placed in exactly the position which is previously learned by the teaching playback robot.
Therefore, it is customary that the user temporarily moves mirrors from a tray having dimensionally coarse mirror accommodating portions to a tray having highly-accurate mirror accommodating portions, i.e., mirror accommodating portions with accuracy corresponding to the accuracy of the allowable position range of the teaching playback robot in a manual fashion.
Alternatively, the user picks up the mirrors from a tray having a dimensionally-coarse mirror accommodating portions and rearranges the picked up mirrors on a parts rearrangement rack.
However, if the user replaces the mirrors in a manual fashion, this work is low in efficiency so that the assembled apparatus (data cartridge body with the mirror assembled thereto in the above example) becomes expensive.
In order to improve this situation, there is proposed a method in which a part's position is recognized and specified by a robot having a video camera and in which the specified part is picked up and attached to the apparatus body by the robot. In this case, however, the amount of image data which needs to be processed is enormous and therefore it takes a long time to pick up the parts. As a result, the efficiency of the mass production line is lowered, and the assembled apparatus cannot be made inexpensively. In addition, considering the overall arrangement of the apparatus composed of the robot with the video camera and the video data processing apparatus for processing video data from the video camera, there is then the defect that the whole robot apparatus become extremely complex.